Gender: Female
Occupation: High Priestess of Kau'uli
Faith: Kau'uli
Age: 29
Marital Status: Single
Height: 5'6"
Body: Slender
Eyes: Brown
Hair: Black
Aayushi bears the exotic looks that identify her as a native of the Ivory Kingdoms, and those speaking with her can still detect a heavy Invidian accent in her broken Mekhem. Her words are carefully chosen and precise, and while she is quite capable of holding a conversation in the native language of Medinaat al-Salaam, she still occasionally stumbles over obscure words or difficult concepts.
As the High Priestess of Kau'uli, much of Aayushi's time is spent within the Temple of the Black Snake, within the Foreign Districts. Whether within her temple or walking the streets of the city, Aayushi dresses in a simple white gown with a few modest pieces of jewelry, including a distinctive tiara of foreign design. By far her most noticeable feature, however, is the intricate tattoo which winds its way up her right arm, stopping just short of her neck and breast. The tattoo bears the design of an interlaced series of colorful vines, leaves, and flowers, and is clearly a work of great skill and patience.
Despite being a refugee from the Ivory Kingdoms, Aayushi seems to be disliked almost universally by her own people, and there have been a few incidents where the City Guard has had to intervene to prevent her from being attacked by her fellow Ivindi. In recent months, she has risen to a position on the council of Mubin ibn Safi, the administrator of the foreign district, as a representative of the Ivindi people within his district, much to the displeasure of the Ivindi people in question.
Origins
Aayushi's mother was a Brahmin (one of the priestly caste of the Ivory Kingdoms) sworn to the service of Lajja, a popular fertility goddess in the city of Ankyuu. She was conceived during what was essentially a religious orgy and thus grew up without knowledge of her father, a somewhat common background for most priestesses of the goddess. Her childhood was spent watching her mother and the other priestesses performing the rites and rituals of Lajja for themselves and others, and she truly believed their claims that she – like them – was the link between the goddess and the common man.
During her ninth year, a minor faction that had been slowly gathering strength within the faith of Lajja finally came to power, and with them came changes to the rites and rituals that Aayushi had been studying. At first these changes were small things, but over the next few years she began to hear rumors of secret rituals that were being performed in the jungles beyond the walls of Ankyuu. Whenever she would ask about such things, however, the other priestesses would cast worried looks out of the window and bade her not to speak of such things.
Despite these strange whispers, Aayushi continued to study the religious texts that were given to her, and even earned a fair amount of praise from Sanjana, the high priestess of Lajja, for her dedication to the goddess. When a cloaked priestess came to her room in the middle of the night shortly after her thirteenth birthday and bade Aayushi to follow her out of the city, the young girl could hardly contain her excitement at having been chosen for such an honor.
When Aayushi returned to the temple with the dawn, she was in such a state of shock that the other priestesses feared that she had caught some strange sickness. She eventually recovered, to a point, but it was clear to everyone that the strange sickness had left its mark upon her, for her previous studiousness had been replaced with an obsessive fixation with searching through the oldest of the temple’s religious texts, many of which had not been read in generations and were on the verge of crumbling to dust in her hands. These Aayushi transcribed onto fresh scrolls, often times adding her own confusing and nonsensical comments in the margins. This behavior was troubling to many of the priestesses, including her mother, but when they brought their concerns to Sanjana, the high priestess turned them away, pointing out that Aayushi had done more to restore their damaged texts in the past few months than any priestess in living memory.
Her obsessive work with the temple’s texts did not go uninterrupted, though, for every month, and then every two or three weeks, and finally every week a priestess would come for her in the night, leading the quiet and unprotesting Aayushi back out into the jungle and whatever hidden rites took place in its dark depths. Always she would return shaken and troubled, prompting whispers of a lingering sickness from those priestesses who were uninitiated and did not know of the dark jungle rituals.
Eventually, the cult that had wormed its way into the heart of Lajja's faith began to grow lax in its secrecy, and one night when she was sixteen Sanjana followed a handful of wayward priestesses into the jungle and saw just what sort of dark creatures they had chosen for allies. Though Aayushi was present among the other cultists, she has mercifully been unable to remember exactly what happened that night, save for the briefest flashes of unnatural shapes and foul words that haunt her nightmares to this day.
Descent into Corruption
Aayushi awoke in her bed the next afternoon, naked and covered with dirt, dried blood, and bits of torn leaves. When she left to find a basin of water to wash herself, it became clear that something had shifted within the temple. Some of the priestesses walked with renewed purpose and vigor, while others – including her mother – turned their eyes down to the ground as she passed, turning away when she attempted to speak with them. Nobody spoke of Sanjana or what had happened to her or the temple’s guardians, but Reshmi, a priestess that Aayushi had seen at the jungle ceremonies, had claimed her title.
Reshmi approached the confused and traumatized Aayushi later that day, seducing her and asking her to make a few alterations to the religious texts that she had been translating. In her fragile state, Aayushi was in no shape to resist her superior’s commands, and within a few weeks Reshmi was able to produce “ancient texts” that proved that Lajja was merely an aspect of a greater deity, the goddess Kau’uli. With the altered texts, Reshmi and the other priestesses of the cult were able to combine the teachings of Lajja with the “original” prayers to Kau’uli, creating a profane combination of the two faiths.
Of course, those priestesses who were not members of the cult were horrified to see what was happening to their faith and took steps to end the sickness that had wormed its way into their temple. Some were seduced by their fellow priestesses, their religious couplings turned into something darker and more carnal, until they turned their backs on their beliefs in exchange for burying their guilt in the arms of multiple lovers. Others sought to speak with their fellow priestesses in an attempt to make them see reason, or to simply flee from the temple to seek help.
By that time, however, it was too late, for the new guardians of the temple were fond of the coin and warm beds that came with their job, and most of the priestesses seeking reason or escape were caught and brought to Reshmi’s attention.
It would not be inaccurate to say that Aayushi had spent the next four years in something of a haze, with the constant scribbling in scrolls and rough, often unwanted embraces of her lovers blending together to wash away any real sense of time or importance. She was only living in the physical sense of the word, for it was simply too easy to hide within the depths of her mind and her scrolls and let others do to her body as they wished.
Rise to Power
In an attempt to pull her out of her funk, Reshmi took Aayushi under her wing (and back into her bed), essentially adopting the girl as her protégé. It was at some point during this time that Aayushi’s mother disappeared from the temple; Reshmi claimed that she fled out of guilt for not being able to reconcile her false beliefs of Lajja with the new truths that Aayushi had uncovered in the temple’s holy texts, but in the years since that day, Aayushi has looked upon the story and come to believe that Reshmi had simply had her mother killed to ensure that her control over Aayushi was complete.
Beneath Reshmi’s tutelage, Aayushi gradually came back out of her mental fugue, but two years of near constant company with the high priestess had essentially transformed Aayushi’s devotion to Lajja into an equal fervor for the “true” worship of the goddess in her aspect of Kau'uli. Reshmi convinced the girl that her time spent altering the holy texts was not done on her behalf, but upon the request of the goddess, who had chosen Aayushi as her favored prophet. According to Reshmi, the things she had written in the books were done while under the divine inspiration of Kau’uli, a fanciful story which explained the disconnection the girl had felt with her life since that first night in the jungle.
While this tactic quite successfully put Aayushi under Reshmi’s control and gave the high priestess a very devout worshiper of their goddess, it also turned the Aayushi into something of a religious fanatic, and one that believed that she had been personally chosen by her goddess at that. It took three years for Aayushi to decide that Reshmi was more concerned with her orgies than she was with the worship of Kau’uli, and about two hours after that for Remshi to find herself on a stone altar with a dagger in her heart.
A Spreading Madness
Under the nineteen year old Aayushi’s control, the church of Kau’uli abandoned all trappings of worshiping Lajja, greatly dialed back the number of orgies that were by then being held almost constantly within the temple, and set about codifying the worship of the goddess as dictated by her self-professed prophet. Unfortunately, Aayushi also began to look towards her constant nightmares of towering jungle demons as divine guidance from Kau'uli, which led to an increase in far more unsavory elements among her faith's rites, such as a preference for human sacrifice.
These dreams also resulted in a growing fascination with cannibalism, which Aayushi managed to resist for about a year before finally breaking down and giving in to her curiosity. Perhaps it was the taboo nature of the act or the some intensely personal connection with the corpse that her overexposure to sex had left her without, but the act of consuming the poor man who had followed her back into her room at the temple left her satisfied and fulfilled in a way that she had never known.
Over the next year, Aayushi found herself feasting more and more often, and soon the bones outside the temple began to pile up as the city whispered of a flesh-eating demoness was prowling the streets. When the city guard eventually raided the temple of Kau’uli and broke down the door to her bedroom, they found Aayushi naked and crouched over a half-eaten body, a look of surprise on her blood-smeared face.
Flight from the Ivory Kingdoms
The priestess’s story might have ended then and there, but the guards were so stunned at the horrific scene before them that by the time they found their senses, Aayushi was already scrambling out the window and into the temple’s garden. The temple of Kau’uli was put to the torch, those members of the faith that the city guard could find were executed for a litany of dark crimes, and Aayushi fled from the Ivory Kingdoms as quickly as she was able. Fortunately for her, the Ivory Kingdoms was soon plunged into chaos by Kali-Ma, and Aayushi spent the next five years traveling northward with only mild harassment from refugees and desert travelers.
She wandered for six years before encountering merchants from House Asmari at a small oasis east of Medinaat al-Salaam, and convinced them that the company of a beautiful woman on their journey had its own rewards, even if her coin purse was empty. By the time they had arrived at the city, she had sufficiently impressed the merchants enough that her name was passed around the hallways of Ikram al-Asmari’s home. It wasn’t enough to earn her a personal meeting with the man, but her stories of religious persecution – combined with a few nights spent with various influential merchants – were enough to earn her the building that would eventually become the Temple of the Black Snake.
Now approaching her thirtieth year, Aayushi seeks to rebuild her faith and continue the worship of Kau’uli, but this time in a much more careful and controlled manner. She has gathered a few young acolytes to her side and has begun training them in the mysteries of her goddess. Her time spent living in the wilds and traveling from oasis to oasis has shown the previously spoiled priestess the simple value of food, and how one can win the hearts and souls of the hungry with only a few pieces of bread and some kind words. To this end her temple has taken it upon herself to feed the poor, with daily offerings of bread, water, and thin soup for those willing to listen to her honeyed words and utter a few prayers to Kau'uli.
It’s a slow start, and nothing like the luxury she had enjoyed in the Ivory Kingdoms, but Aayushi knows that such things are nothing compared with the simple joy of being allowed to once again serve her goddess. After all, where else is the All-Mother’s presence needed most, if not in the middle of a barren desert?
The Burning Jewel
(WIP)
Post-Burning Jewel
In the summer of 1176 the Temple of the Black Snake became a focal point of the religious riots that rocked the city. Aayushi fought against mobs of looters on the steps of the temple, ripping the life essence out of the heathens with her goddess's dark magics, but in the end she was forced to flee with her bodyguards, and much of the temple's newly acquired riches were lost to looters and vandalism.
Shortly after fleeing from her temple, Aayushi was detained for her blatant use of lethal magic in its defense. There were some vocal pleas from local Ivindi residents that she be executed for worshiping a "foul demon-goddess," but such claims held little merit in the midst of a religious riot and were generally ignored by the Guard. After determining that she had acted in self defense and within her own property lines, she was cleared of all charges, but was allowed to remain within the city's facilities for her own protection, until the worst of the rioting had died down.
Aayushi returned to the Temple of the Black Snake to find it gutted and vandalized, its walls painted with anti-Ivindi graffiti and racial slurs. As her surviving acolytes began repairing and cleaning the temple, Aayushi used her ties with the Storyteller's guild - and the permission it granted her to sermonize to the poor and destitute in the guise of stories from her homeland - to paint herself as a faithful Ivindi woman wrongfully persecuted for her religious beliefs.
Such a message might have fallen upon deaf and uncaring ears, were it not for Aayushi's decision to open the doors of her temple to those displaced by the frequent fires which burned throughout many of the city's streets. Within the stone walls of the temple, such desperate men and women were helpless before Aayushi's relentless proselytizing and subtler magics. When the fires finally die down and allow the refugees to return to their lives, more than a few do so with prayers to Kau'uli on their lips.
As Medinaat al-Salaam gradually returned to normal, Aayushi was approached by a representative of Mubin ibn Safi, the administrator of the foreign district. With the recent influx of Ivindi refugees to the city, he wished to add an influential member of their people to his council to represent their interests, and assumed that Aayushi had been a prominent priestess back in her homeland. Aayushi quickly accepted the offer, much the chagrin of the city's Ivindi population, who view her promotion as something akin to a direct insult to their people.
Aayushi
Gender: Female
Occupation: High Priestess of Kau'uli
Faith: Kau'uli
Age: 29
Marital Status: Single
Height: 5'6"
Body: Slender
Eyes: Brown
Hair: Black
Aayushi bears the exotic looks that identify her as a native of the Ivory Kingdoms, and those speaking with her can still detect a heavy Invidian accent in her broken Mekhem. Her words are carefully chosen and precise, and while she is quite capable of holding a conversation in the native language of Medinaat al-Salaam, she still occasionally stumbles over obscure words or difficult concepts.
As the High Priestess of Kau'uli, much of Aayushi's time is spent within the Temple of the Black Snake, within the Foreign Districts. Whether within her temple or walking the streets of the city, Aayushi dresses in a simple white gown with a few modest pieces of jewelry, including a distinctive tiara of foreign design. By far her most noticeable feature, however, is the intricate tattoo which winds its way up her right arm, stopping just short of her neck and breast. The tattoo bears the design of an interlaced series of colorful vines, leaves, and flowers, and is clearly a work of great skill and patience.
Despite being a refugee from the Ivory Kingdoms, Aayushi seems to be disliked almost universally by her own people, and there have been a few incidents where the City Guard has had to intervene to prevent her from being attacked by her fellow Ivindi. In recent months, she has risen to a position on the council of Mubin ibn Safi, the administrator of the foreign district, as a representative of the Ivindi people within his district, much to the displeasure of the Ivindi people in question.
Origins
Aayushi's mother was a Brahmin (one of the priestly caste of the Ivory Kingdoms) sworn to the service of Lajja, a popular fertility goddess in the city of Ankyuu. She was conceived during what was essentially a religious orgy and thus grew up without knowledge of her father, a somewhat common background for most priestesses of the goddess. Her childhood was spent watching her mother and the other priestesses performing the rites and rituals of Lajja for themselves and others, and she truly believed their claims that she – like them – was the link between the goddess and the common man.
During her ninth year, a minor faction that had been slowly gathering strength within the faith of Lajja finally came to power, and with them came changes to the rites and rituals that Aayushi had been studying. At first these changes were small things, but over the next few years she began to hear rumors of secret rituals that were being performed in the jungles beyond the walls of Ankyuu. Whenever she would ask about such things, however, the other priestesses would cast worried looks out of the window and bade her not to speak of such things.
Despite these strange whispers, Aayushi continued to study the religious texts that were given to her, and even earned a fair amount of praise from Sanjana, the high priestess of Lajja, for her dedication to the goddess. When a cloaked priestess came to her room in the middle of the night shortly after her thirteenth birthday and bade Aayushi to follow her out of the city, the young girl could hardly contain her excitement at having been chosen for such an honor.
When Aayushi returned to the temple with the dawn, she was in such a state of shock that the other priestesses feared that she had caught some strange sickness. She eventually recovered, to a point, but it was clear to everyone that the strange sickness had left its mark upon her, for her previous studiousness had been replaced with an obsessive fixation with searching through the oldest of the temple’s religious texts, many of which had not been read in generations and were on the verge of crumbling to dust in her hands. These Aayushi transcribed onto fresh scrolls, often times adding her own confusing and nonsensical comments in the margins. This behavior was troubling to many of the priestesses, including her mother, but when they brought their concerns to Sanjana, the high priestess turned them away, pointing out that Aayushi had done more to restore their damaged texts in the past few months than any priestess in living memory.
Her obsessive work with the temple’s texts did not go uninterrupted, though, for every month, and then every two or three weeks, and finally every week a priestess would come for her in the night, leading the quiet and unprotesting Aayushi back out into the jungle and whatever hidden rites took place in its dark depths. Always she would return shaken and troubled, prompting whispers of a lingering sickness from those priestesses who were uninitiated and did not know of the dark jungle rituals.
Eventually, the cult that had wormed its way into the heart of Lajja's faith began to grow lax in its secrecy, and one night when she was sixteen Sanjana followed a handful of wayward priestesses into the jungle and saw just what sort of dark creatures they had chosen for allies. Though Aayushi was present among the other cultists, she has mercifully been unable to remember exactly what happened that night, save for the briefest flashes of unnatural shapes and foul words that haunt her nightmares to this day.
Descent into Corruption
Aayushi awoke in her bed the next afternoon, naked and covered with dirt, dried blood, and bits of torn leaves. When she left to find a basin of water to wash herself, it became clear that something had shifted within the temple. Some of the priestesses walked with renewed purpose and vigor, while others – including her mother – turned their eyes down to the ground as she passed, turning away when she attempted to speak with them. Nobody spoke of Sanjana or what had happened to her or the temple’s guardians, but Reshmi, a priestess that Aayushi had seen at the jungle ceremonies, had claimed her title.
Reshmi approached the confused and traumatized Aayushi later that day, seducing her and asking her to make a few alterations to the religious texts that she had been translating. In her fragile state, Aayushi was in no shape to resist her superior’s commands, and within a few weeks Reshmi was able to produce “ancient texts” that proved that Lajja was merely an aspect of a greater deity, the goddess Kau’uli. With the altered texts, Reshmi and the other priestesses of the cult were able to combine the teachings of Lajja with the “original” prayers to Kau’uli, creating a profane combination of the two faiths.
Of course, those priestesses who were not members of the cult were horrified to see what was happening to their faith and took steps to end the sickness that had wormed its way into their temple. Some were seduced by their fellow priestesses, their religious couplings turned into something darker and more carnal, until they turned their backs on their beliefs in exchange for burying their guilt in the arms of multiple lovers. Others sought to speak with their fellow priestesses in an attempt to make them see reason, or to simply flee from the temple to seek help.
By that time, however, it was too late, for the new guardians of the temple were fond of the coin and warm beds that came with their job, and most of the priestesses seeking reason or escape were caught and brought to Reshmi’s attention.
It would not be inaccurate to say that Aayushi had spent the next four years in something of a haze, with the constant scribbling in scrolls and rough, often unwanted embraces of her lovers blending together to wash away any real sense of time or importance. She was only living in the physical sense of the word, for it was simply too easy to hide within the depths of her mind and her scrolls and let others do to her body as they wished.
Rise to Power
In an attempt to pull her out of her funk, Reshmi took Aayushi under her wing (and back into her bed), essentially adopting the girl as her protégé. It was at some point during this time that Aayushi’s mother disappeared from the temple; Reshmi claimed that she fled out of guilt for not being able to reconcile her false beliefs of Lajja with the new truths that Aayushi had uncovered in the temple’s holy texts, but in the years since that day, Aayushi has looked upon the story and come to believe that Reshmi had simply had her mother killed to ensure that her control over Aayushi was complete.
Beneath Reshmi’s tutelage, Aayushi gradually came back out of her mental fugue, but two years of near constant company with the high priestess had essentially transformed Aayushi’s devotion to Lajja into an equal fervor for the “true” worship of the goddess in her aspect of Kau'uli. Reshmi convinced the girl that her time spent altering the holy texts was not done on her behalf, but upon the request of the goddess, who had chosen Aayushi as her favored prophet. According to Reshmi, the things she had written in the books were done while under the divine inspiration of Kau’uli, a fanciful story which explained the disconnection the girl had felt with her life since that first night in the jungle.
While this tactic quite successfully put Aayushi under Reshmi’s control and gave the high priestess a very devout worshiper of their goddess, it also turned the Aayushi into something of a religious fanatic, and one that believed that she had been personally chosen by her goddess at that. It took three years for Aayushi to decide that Reshmi was more concerned with her orgies than she was with the worship of Kau’uli, and about two hours after that for Remshi to find herself on a stone altar with a dagger in her heart.
A Spreading Madness
Under the nineteen year old Aayushi’s control, the church of Kau’uli abandoned all trappings of worshiping Lajja, greatly dialed back the number of orgies that were by then being held almost constantly within the temple, and set about codifying the worship of the goddess as dictated by her self-professed prophet. Unfortunately, Aayushi also began to look towards her constant nightmares of towering jungle demons as divine guidance from Kau'uli, which led to an increase in far more unsavory elements among her faith's rites, such as a preference for human sacrifice.
These dreams also resulted in a growing fascination with cannibalism, which Aayushi managed to resist for about a year before finally breaking down and giving in to her curiosity. Perhaps it was the taboo nature of the act or the some intensely personal connection with the corpse that her overexposure to sex had left her without, but the act of consuming the poor man who had followed her back into her room at the temple left her satisfied and fulfilled in a way that she had never known.
Over the next year, Aayushi found herself feasting more and more often, and soon the bones outside the temple began to pile up as the city whispered of a flesh-eating demoness was prowling the streets. When the city guard eventually raided the temple of Kau’uli and broke down the door to her bedroom, they found Aayushi naked and crouched over a half-eaten body, a look of surprise on her blood-smeared face.
Flight from the Ivory Kingdoms
The priestess’s story might have ended then and there, but the guards were so stunned at the horrific scene before them that by the time they found their senses, Aayushi was already scrambling out the window and into the temple’s garden. The temple of Kau’uli was put to the torch, those members of the faith that the city guard could find were executed for a litany of dark crimes, and Aayushi fled from the Ivory Kingdoms as quickly as she was able. Fortunately for her, the Ivory Kingdoms was soon plunged into chaos by Kali-Ma, and Aayushi spent the next five years traveling northward with only mild harassment from refugees and desert travelers.
She wandered for six years before encountering merchants from House Asmari at a small oasis east of Medinaat al-Salaam, and convinced them that the company of a beautiful woman on their journey had its own rewards, even if her coin purse was empty. By the time they had arrived at the city, she had sufficiently impressed the merchants enough that her name was passed around the hallways of Ikram al-Asmari’s home. It wasn’t enough to earn her a personal meeting with the man, but her stories of religious persecution – combined with a few nights spent with various influential merchants – were enough to earn her the building that would eventually become the Temple of the Black Snake.
Now approaching her thirtieth year, Aayushi seeks to rebuild her faith and continue the worship of Kau’uli, but this time in a much more careful and controlled manner. She has gathered a few young acolytes to her side and has begun training them in the mysteries of her goddess. Her time spent living in the wilds and traveling from oasis to oasis has shown the previously spoiled priestess the simple value of food, and how one can win the hearts and souls of the hungry with only a few pieces of bread and some kind words. To this end her temple has taken it upon herself to feed the poor, with daily offerings of bread, water, and thin soup for those willing to listen to her honeyed words and utter a few prayers to Kau'uli.
It’s a slow start, and nothing like the luxury she had enjoyed in the Ivory Kingdoms, but Aayushi knows that such things are nothing compared with the simple joy of being allowed to once again serve her goddess. After all, where else is the All-Mother’s presence needed most, if not in the middle of a barren desert?
The Burning Jewel
(WIP)
Post-Burning Jewel
In the summer of 1176 the Temple of the Black Snake became a focal point of the religious riots that rocked the city. Aayushi fought against mobs of looters on the steps of the temple, ripping the life essence out of the heathens with her goddess's dark magics, but in the end she was forced to flee with her bodyguards, and much of the temple's newly acquired riches were lost to looters and vandalism.
Shortly after fleeing from her temple, Aayushi was detained for her blatant use of lethal magic in its defense. There were some vocal pleas from local Ivindi residents that she be executed for worshiping a "foul demon-goddess," but such claims held little merit in the midst of a religious riot and were generally ignored by the Guard. After determining that she had acted in self defense and within her own property lines, she was cleared of all charges, but was allowed to remain within the city's facilities for her own protection, until the worst of the rioting had died down.
Aayushi returned to the Temple of the Black Snake to find it gutted and vandalized, its walls painted with anti-Ivindi graffiti and racial slurs. As her surviving acolytes began repairing and cleaning the temple, Aayushi used her ties with the Storyteller's guild - and the permission it granted her to sermonize to the poor and destitute in the guise of stories from her homeland - to paint herself as a faithful Ivindi woman wrongfully persecuted for her religious beliefs.
Such a message might have fallen upon deaf and uncaring ears, were it not for Aayushi's decision to open the doors of her temple to those displaced by the frequent fires which burned throughout many of the city's streets. Within the stone walls of the temple, such desperate men and women were helpless before Aayushi's relentless proselytizing and subtler magics. When the fires finally die down and allow the refugees to return to their lives, more than a few do so with prayers to Kau'uli on their lips.
As Medinaat al-Salaam gradually returned to normal, Aayushi was approached by a representative of Mubin ibn Safi, the administrator of the foreign district. With the recent influx of Ivindi refugees to the city, he wished to add an influential member of their people to his council to represent their interests, and assumed that Aayushi had been a prominent priestess back in her homeland. Aayushi quickly accepted the offer, much the chagrin of the city's Ivindi population, who view her promotion as something akin to a direct insult to their people.